Why was 1968 the Year of the Pitcher? Let me present to you an unorthodox theory that has been percolating in my brain since I noticed a pattern leafing through the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract a quarter century ago: the dominance of pitching that season was exacerbated by an unusual run of injuries to a number of the game's best hitters, combined to some extent with an unusual run of good health by the game's best pitchers.

Lest we get too carried away with the theory, let me step back a bit. The offensive/defensive conditions of the game change every year, sometimes due to years-long structural factors, sometimes due to weather, chance or other one-year factors. Scoring dropped throughout the 1960s due to a number of the former: a bigger strike zone, more pitcher-friendly parks, higher mounds, more night games, a reduction in the stigma against strikeouts without a corresponding emphasis on plate patience. Those factors affected the game from 1963-68, and some of them continued to linger into the late 1970s. 1968 was simply the most extreme example of its era. Scoring was down from 3.77 runs per team per game to 3.42 (a drop of almost 10%), rising back in 1969 to 4.07.

But I have wondered for years if there was something specific at work that made 1968 stand out from the years around it, and if you look one by one at the injuries to major offensive stars that season, a pattern suggests itself. I do not promise a systematic comparison of 1968 to other seasons in this regard, but take a look at the anecdotal evidence with me and see if you agree.

The Walking Wounded

Let's start with the core group of players, most of them major offensive stars, who were hampered by injury in 1968. I'll list each player's age as of 1968 in parentheses, and a chart showing each player's plate appearances and Offensive Wins Above Replacement (OWAR) for the 1967-1968-1969 seasons (source: baseball-reference.com).

Joe Morgan (24)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

580

5.6

27

0.3

657

4.7

Morgan wasn't the biggest star KO'd by injury in 1968, but he was the most total loss. While he wasn't recognized as a major star until he escaped the Astrodome in 1972, Morgan had been second in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1965, an All-Star in 1966, batted .276/.385/.408 and averaged 20 steals a year from 1965-67, and .253/.366/.392 with 44 steals a year from 1969-71, plus another All-Star appearance in 1970. But 10 games into the 1968 season, with Morgan's OBP at .444, he tore up his knee when Tommie Agee ran into him at second base, ending his season.

Harmon Killebrew (32)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

689

6.9

371

2.1

709

7.5

The biggest home run threat of the 1960s, Killebrew hit .266/.379/.546 from 1959-67, including 44 homers, 131 walks and a second-place MVP finish in 1967. He hit .267/.409/.534 from 1969-71, including 49 homers, 145 walks, 140 RBI and an MVP Award in 1969. In 1968, Killebrew was off his game but still productive (.210/.361/.420, OPS+ of 131); he was batting .204/.347/.392 when he tore a hamstring stretching for a throw in the All-Star Game, and didn't return until September, when he batted .257/.458/.629 but started only 10 games and managed just 48 plate appearances.

Roberto Clemente (33)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

632

8.0

557

4.7

570

6.0

Clemente won the 1966 NL MVP and won his third batting title in four years in 1967, batting .357/.400/.554 and driving in 110 runs. Overall, he batted .332/.375/.503 from 1961-67, and .346/.395/.532 from 1969-71. But in 1968, Clemente was hampered by a nasty shoulder injury he suffered in the offseason at his home in Puerto Rico when a steel railing he was climbing on collapsed on his patio, sending him hurtling down a hill. Clemente tried to play through it, but later admitted that he should have at least skipped spring training; he hit .211/.237/.368 through May 24 before returning to something like his usual form, ending the season at .291/.355/.482.

Frank Robinson (32)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

563

6.5

508

4.3

643

6.4

Robinson, the 1966 Triple Crown winner, was slowed slightly in 1967 by vision problems from a violent collision, which may have lingered the following year; in 1968 he added mumps and a sore arm. He batted .314/.407/.609 in 1966-67 and .299/.400/.524 in 1969-71, but missed 32 games and hit .268/.390/.444 in 1968.

Al Kaline (33)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

550

6.3

389

2.7

518

2.5

Kaline batted .307/.385/.509 from 1955-67, and had arguably his best season as a hitter in 1967, batting .308/.411/.541 (OPS+ of 176). He was still a productive hitter in 1968, batting .287/.392/.428 (OPS+ of 146), and despite an off year in 1969, his batting line from 1969-72 was a robust .286/.378/.456. But Kaline missed six weeks in 1968 after his arm was broken when he was hit by a pitch from Lew Krausse on May 25.

Willie's production fell off in 1967. With Mota continuing to hit .300, Stargell found himself often benched against lefthanders. He suffered through injuries as well that year, crashing into the wall twice in a span of three days and experienced tendonitis in his shoulder. His weight remained and issue and inactivity did not help it. In 1968, Stargell first injured a knee and later suffered a concussion and face lacerations making a spectacular catch while crashing into the Forbes Field scoreboard and ended up hitting .237, the lowest of his career as a regular player as he battled headaches for the rest of the season.

On the whole, Stargell declined from .315/.381/.581 with 102 RBI in 1966 (his second straight 100 RBI year and third straight slugging .500) to .271/.365/.465 with 73 RBI in 1967 and .237/.315/.441 with 67 RBI in just 128 games in 1968. Stargell would bat .307/.382 /556 in 1969 and .289/.375/.555 from 1969-79.

Hank Aaron was on first base, trying to steal, and as Torre tried to sneak a peak back at the catcher and didn't pick up the pitch in time before it hit him. The pitch broke his palate, and Torre said the toughest part was staying in bed for a long period of time.

A devastating hitter when healthy, Rico Carty batted .330/.388/.554 as a rookie in 1964, .324/.382/.505 from 1964-66 before struggling to hit .255/.329/.401 in 1967 while playing with a separated shoulder. Carty then missed the entire 1968 season with tuberculosis. He would return to bat .357/.434/.570 in 1969-70 before his next big injury, to his knee.

Rico Petrocelli (25)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

556

3.0

451

1.8

643

7.9

Like a few others listed above, Petrocelli had injury problems in 1967 that worsened in 1968 before bouncing back healthy in 1969. In Petrocelli's case, it was a bad elbow that cost him 39 games. He had batted .259/.330/.420 as a 24 year old in 1967 (OPS+ of 113) and would enjoy a monster breakout 40-homer .297/.403/.589 season in 1969, hitting .269/.363/.506 from 1969-71 (OPS+ of 134). But hampered by the elbow injury, Petrocelli hit just .234/.292/.374 (OPS+ of 92) in 1968.

The April collision with Morgan wasn't Agee's first bruising of 1968; he was hospitalized after being beaned by Bob Gibson on the first pitch of spring training, and things didn't get better from there: the 1966 AL Rookie of the Year had batted .256/.315/.412 (OPS+ 117) in 1966-67 and would bat .280/.348/.456 (OPS+ 121) from 1969-71, but in 1968 he was helpless, batting .217/.255/.307 (OPS+ 69) and doing even that well only with a strong September; Agee was hitting .109 in mid-May, .165 in mid-July and .181/.222/.265 on August 26 before regaining his bearings to hit .371/.397/.486 in his last 25 games.

Tony Oliva (29)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

615

3.4

528

3.4

692

3.6

Another outstanding talent (he was feared enough to lead the AL in intentional walks in 1968) whose career was degraded by injuries, the 1964 Rookie of the Year and 1965 Al MVP runner-up batted .317/.363/.518 from 1964-66 (OPS+ 143), .322/.362/.517 (OPS+ 140) from 1969-71. He had had a mild off year (.289/.347/.463, OPS+ 129) in 1967, and in that context his 1968 season (.289/.357/.477, OPS+ 145) looks like the same old Oliva, just hitting under more difficult conditions. But Oliva averaged 664 plate appearances a year from 1964-67 and 683 a year in 1969-70, whereas he missed 34 games in 1968 including the entire month of September with a separated shoulder, and finished the season with just 68 RBI.

Dick Allen (26)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

540

6.8

605

5.3

506

4.9

Allen, a better hitter than a good many Hall of Fame sluggers, was still a dangerous hitter in 1968 and had injury problems that season that were not unusual for him, but he may still deserve mention here; he suffered a groin injury and may have been suffering some aftereffects from the injury that ended his 1967 season (he tore up his hand pushing it through a car headlight on August 24); Allen started slowly, batting .257/.330/.396 through May 17, and while he caught fire after missing 8 games in early June, he ended up tailing off, batting .240/.334/.498 in the season's second half (this being Dick Allen, that could also have been the results of a bruised ego, as he was feuding with his manager at the time). On the whole, Allen hit .312/.400/.601 in 1966-67 (OPS +178) - only Frank Robinson was better over that period - and .297/.390/.557 from 1969-74 (OPS+ 166). In that context, 1968 counts as a mild off year for Allen, .263/.352/.520 (OPS+ 160) with a career-high 161 strikeouts.

Adding Up The Damage

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

7827

64.0

5244

29.6

8264

61.7

I don't want to overstate the effect of this rash of injuries to productive hitters, but the numbers do suggest that injuries to these 14 hitters alone were enough to have some effect at the margins. Combined, they accounted for 6.4% of all Major League plate appearances in 1967, 4.3% in 1968, and - with expansion - 5.6% in 1969. But not just any plate appearances - almost all of these guys were stationed at the top or middle of their teams' batting orders, and the combined loss of 30-35 offensive WAR in a 24-team league is a lot of holes to fill.

In doing any sort of comparison, of course, we also have to consider that the 1969 bounce-back is inflated by expansion, which not only dilutes talent levels but tends to dilute them asymmetrically in favor of more scoring (marginal pitchers trapped in the minors are mostly there because they can't pitch, whereas many marginal non-pitchers are trapped in the minors because they can hit but can't field; adding more bad pitchers and a mix of bad hitters with good hitters who can't field will, on balance, bring more scoring).

More Off Years

Of course, those 14 hitters were not the only ones to have a tough time in 1968, even relative to the league. To complete the picture, I'll run here through a number of other players who had off years, some of them obviously not injury-related and others perhaps caused by unknown or minor injuries. But absent some reason to classify some of them as injury problems, I would not consider them as part of the analysis.

Carl Yastrzemski (28)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

680

9.5

664

7.1

707

3.8

Yaz was healthy and one of the three best hitters in baseball in 1968, but his 1967 Triple Crown season was not something he could repeat. Nobody had a year like it in 1968.

Orlando Cepeda (30)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

644

6.0

656

1.4

636

1.8

The unanimous 1967 NL MVP had back-to-back off years in 1968-69 (dropping from .314/.381/.500, OPS+ 148 to .252/.316/.402 OPS+ 108) before a big bounce back in 1970 (.305/.365/.543, OPS+ 136). I suspect his chronically bad knees may have had something to do with that, but that's just guesswork.

Tim McCarver (26)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

540

4.5

467

1.8

576

1.8

Injuries for catchers can just accumulate. McCarver's reduced playing time and production suggest he was banged up.

Paul Blair (24)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

619

3.9

467

0.0

685

3.9

I don't know of any injuries - Blair's famous beaning by Ken Tatum came in 1970 - but 1968 was a total loss for him with the bat, .211/.277/.318 (OPS+ 81), compared to .288/.338/.435 (OPS+ 126) in 1966-67 and .277/.335/.460 (OPS+ 119) in 1969-70.

Tommy Davis (29)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

621

2.5

482

-1.2

492

-1.0

Again, I don't know of specific injuries, but Davis had many knee problems in his career and fell off dramatically relative to the league in 1968.

George Scott (24)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

641

3.5

387

-3.3

617

1.6

The Boomer had his usual spats with management over his weight, but seems to have just lost his batting eye in 1968, dropping from .303/.373/.465 to .171/.236/.237; he would go on to a long, productive career as a slugger.

Curt Blefary (24)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

645

2.7

535

0.3

632

1.5

I'm not aware of any injury problems; the 1965 AL Rookie of the Year, who batted .252/.361/.447 (OPS+ 133) just fell apart, .200/.301/.322 (OPS+ 89) despite improving his K/BB ratio significantly. He would hit .253/.347/.393 (OPS+ 109) in the Astrodome the following year, his last as a productive hitter.

Rod Carew (22)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

561

2.8

492

1.8

504

4.7

Carew was healthy and still just a young hitter coming into his own; his playing time was held back by his military commitments, which included 19 games away from the team in June 1968 to attend a summer training camp.

Tony Gonzalez (31)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

568

4.1

471

1.4

561

-0.4

Gonzalez, a good hitter earlier in the decade, had a fluke year in 1967, hitting .339/.396/.472, but was never really a major offensive threat after that.

Wes Parker (28)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

496

1.5

534

0.7

541

3.4

Parker missed 3 weeks in August, but this doesn't seem all that unusual for him, and he was ordinarily not a major offensive star. But he did drop off from .250/.355/.367 (OPS+ 112) in 1966-67 and .301/.375/.444 (OPS+ 129) in 1969-70 to .239/.312/.314 (OPS+ 96) in 1968.

Jim Ray Hart (26)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

665

6.5

535

3.5

271

1.0

A dangerous hitter from 1964-67 (.290/.352/.501, OPS+ 136) Hart's career was ended prematurely by injuries including shoulder problems, supposedly stemming from being hit in the shoulder by Bob Gibson. He batted .258/.323/.444 (OPS+128) in 1968 and missed 26 games, including a week in May and another in August, compared to the 664 plate appearances he averaged the prior four years, and never played a full season again. It appears that he was never hit by Gibson in a regular season game, so unless Gibson's just making up the story, it may have happened in a spring game, like Gibson's beaning of Agee, but the year would be unclear.

Ron Santo (28)

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

697

7.3

682

5.2

687

5.0

Yeah, I didn't realize Santo and Yaz were the same age, either, which is the main reason I bothered listing him here. He, too, was coming off a big 1967, and was healthy as a horse.

If you just include Parker, who was definitely injured, and Carew, who was definitely unavailable for reasons unrelated to the offensive conditions, the chart I ran above now looks like this:

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

8884

68.3

6270

32.1

9309

69.8

If you then add in Cepeda, McCarver and Tommy Davis, you get this:

1967 PA

OWAR

1968 PA

OWAR

1969 PA

OWAR

10689

81.3

7857

34.1

11013

72.4

Without running the full numbers, there were a few other players who busted out of 2-3 year funks in 1969: Boog Powell (who'd been injured in 1966-67 but was healthy in 1968), Ron Fairly, Willie Davis (Bill James in the 1988 Abstract identified Davis as a guy who lost a lot to the expanded strike zone of 1963-68; he had no injury issues). Hank Aaron's OWAR for 1967-69 read 8.1-5.2-7.1, but he was healthy. 1968 also saw a couple of long-productive sluggers hit the wall with age: Bob Allison, Leon Wagner. Mickey Mantle was at the end, but was more productive than his numbers looked at first glance, and Mickey had been in gradual decline for a few years.

1969 also saw a bunch of guys bust out big compared to their 1967-68 OWAR. Some were productive hitters in 1968 who blossomed even further with expansion, better hitting conditions and marginally better health: Willie McCovey (who missed 14 games in 1968), Pete Rose (who uncharacteristically missed 2 weeks in July 1968 but still managed 692 plate appearances), Frank Howard, Jimmie Wynn, Reggie Smith, Rusty Staub, Cleon Jones, Tony Perez. There were also a crop of young players who established themselves offensive stars for the first time in 1969, in many cases 1968 rookies or guys who got their first full seasons in 1969: Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench, Sal Bando, Bobby Bonds, Bobby Tolan, Alex Johnson, Mike Epstein. A passel of young talent can contribute to changing the balance of power between hitters and pitchers, but then 1968's crop of rookie pitchers included guys like Jerry Koosman and Stan Bahnsen who enjoyed immediate success; it's probably an effect rather than a cause of the offensive environment that many of the rookie hitters that season needed more time to adjust.

Finally, despite the offensive conditions or in some cases perhaps because of them, there were a handful of major hitters who had better years (measured by OWAR) in 1968 than in 1967 or 1969. Some just had career years (Willie Horton, Ken Harrelson) or at least happened to be right at their peak (Bill Freehan) or enjoying an up year in a series of ups and downs (Felipe Alou, Matty Alou, Roy White). Others just gave up less ground than the rest of the league (Willie Mays, Billy Williams, Lou Brock, Brooks Robinson, Ernie Banks).

The Pitchers

I have thus far addressed the hitters and their problems. But there's a dog that didn't bark much in 1968: pitching injuries, normally the bane of every baseball team. For example, contrasted to the number of injured, in-their-prime Hall of Fame hitters in 1968, there were 14 Hall of Fame pitchers active that season. Two were relievers: Hoyt Wilhelm made 72 appearances, Rollie Fingers was 21 and made his Major League debut on September 15. Of the 12 starters, 9 started at least 31 games and threw at least 232 innings, plus Don Sutton, who started 27 games and threw 207 innings, plus 21 year old rookie Nolan Ryan, who started 18 games. And that includes a number of guys who were right at the top of their game - Gibson, Marichal, Seaver, Drysdale, Jenkins. Only Jim Bunning was hurt: Bunning was perhaps the best pitcher in baseball in 1967, but he was 36 and broke down in 1968, starting 26 games and throwing 160 innings on the way to a 4-14 season. Of course, there were two other major injuries: Jim Palmer started only 9 games in 1967 and missed all of 1968 at age 22, and Sandy Koufax, still just 32, had retired after 1966 (Whitey Ford's career was also ended by injury in early 1967). The Hall of Famers hit 1968 like a bullseye: Bob Gibson, who had the great 1.12 ERA, had missed two months with a broken leg the year before, while Don Drysdale, who set the scoreless innings record that would stand for two decades, blew his arm out the next year. 1968 AL ERA champ Luis Tiant (1.60 ERA) would struggle in 1969 before missing large chunks of 1970-71 with arm woes, and 31 game winner Denny McLain would be effectively finished as a star by arm trouble in 1970, as would longtime AL star Dean Chance in 1969.

Looking more broadly around the league, there were a few other pitching injuries. Tommy John and of course Gary Nolan missed about 10 starts each. Jim Perry pitched well with a reduced workload, but it's not clear if he had arm trouble or was just in a 2-year state of exile as a swing man. Overall, 67 pitchers started 27 or more games, an average of 2.8 per team - not bad for a league that mostly used four-man rotations. 56 pitchers cleared 200 innings. These were not especially shocking figures for the era, but they do support the view that there were a lot of healthy arms around.

In short, there were a lot of reasons why 1968 became the Year of the Pitcher - but the fact that a lot of the game's elite hitters were hampered by significant injuries, while most of the game's best pitchers were healthy, surely had at least some role at the margins in tipping the scales towards the men on the mound.

I recently finished reading Sean Trende's excellent book The Lost Majority, which is a must-read for anyone attempting to intelligently discuss its subject: how winning political coalitions are built, maintained and undone in the modern American two-party system. Trende covers a range of topics. At the level of political science theory, he dismantles the theory of periodic realigning elections. In his historical analysis, he may surprise you by arguing that the most enduring coalition of the past century was assembled not by McKinley, FDR, or Reagan but Dwight Eisenhower. Looking to the recent past and future, he convincingly demonstrates that Obama's 2008 coalition was always more fragile than Democrats at the time believed, and that there remain obstacles to the John Judis/Ruy Teixeira theory of an Emerging Democratic Majority. Trende's major point is that all such predictions of enduring partisan majorities (he cites many dating back over the past century and a half) ignore the fact that political coalitions inevitably draw together factions with different interests and ideologies, and frictions within those coalitions inevitably offer opportunities for the other party to regain support.

But one of the historical narratives that Trende covers in depth is of particular interest because it remains a crucial part of partisan mythology today: the enduring myth of the Southern Strategy. On the occasion of Mitt Romney's address to the NAACP, it is worth revisiting that myth today.

-Stage One, running roughly from the 1787 enactment of the Northwest Ordinance to the 1865 enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, was the long, bloody struggle to contain and ultimately abolish slavery. The two-party system ultimately aligned the Democrats as the defenders of slavery and secession, while the Republican Party was founded as an antislavery party, and the election of a Republican president triggered the Civil War.

-Stage Two, running until 1876 and highlighted by the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and several early civil rights laws, was Reconstruction, which sought to give freed blacks political suffrage and legal equality while dealing with the aftermath of nearly half the country engaging in armed rebellion against the United States. During this period, the "Radical Republicans" of the North and West pressed for more aggressive reconstruction measures, and freed blacks aligned with the GOP, while white Southerners remained the core of the decimated Democratic Party.

-Stage Three, which ran from the deal resolving the contested 1876 election (Democrats accepted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as the winner in exchange for an end to Reconstruction) through the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, was the age of Jim Crow: while African-Americans made legal and economic progress on a few fronts, the overwhelming trend (especially in the South) was one of black disenfranchisement, segregation, and oppressive and terroristic practices ranging from lynchings to Klu Klux Klan activity. The Supreme Court during this period essentially rewrote the Fourteenth Amendment to eviscerate the Privileges & Immunities Clause and the Equal Protection Clause (the latter has recovered; the former remains crippled).

For most of this period, the "Solid South" was regarded as reliably Democratic as well as poor, rural and backward. Black voters - where they were permitted to vote at all - began abandoning the GOP for the Democrats in large numbers by the 1930s. Democrats, in thrall to white Southern support, were more or less enthusiastically united in their support for Jim Crow and resistant to even mild civil rights measures like anti-lynching bills. Segregation was formally introduced in the Army by Woodrow Wilson. Republicans, for their part, remained committed in theory to the ideals of Lincoln, but in practice often followed what Trende describes as the Theodore Roosevelt strategy of accommodating Southern recalcitrance in the hopes that Southern whites would give the GOP a hearing. During the time of Roosevelt and Taft, this strategy was unavailing with white Southerners, but the party's abandonment of any real civil rights agenda set the stage for the loss of its black support between 1928 and 1936.

-Stage Four, running roughly from 1946-65, was the fight for legal equality and the end to Jim Crow and disenfranchisement: desegregation of the armed forces and integration of Major League Baseball in the 1940s, Brown v Board of Education and Rosa Parks in the 1950s, passage of the 24th Amendment banning poll taxes (passed by Congress in 1962, ratified in 1964) and the various landmark civil rights and voting rights bills passed in 1964-65.

The rearguard opposition to civil rights was loud and almost entirely Southern and Democratic; as Kevin Williamson notes, in the 1950s, Southern Democrats in the Senate played what amounted to a good-cop/bad-cop strategy, with Strom Thurmond leading noisy filibusters of civil rights legislation and Lyndon Johnson promising liberal Northern Democrats he could get past the filibusters if the bills were watered down to the point of toothlessness.

The partisan politics of civil rights was complex. Southern Democrats twice bolted the party in tight presidential elections, with Thurmond running in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968, while Northern and Western Democrats generally supported civil rights. Republicans, mostly "liberals" from the North and West, were also mostly supportive (I put "liberals" in quotes here because the liberals on civil rights included a fair number of people like Illinois Congressman Don Rumsfeld who were not liberals by any measure on other issues). As a result, major civil rights bills in the 1950s and 60s generally depended more on Republican than Democratic support in Congress. Conservatives in the GOP and in magazines like National Review were split at the time - few lent their support to the Thurmond/Wallace/Bull Connor faction, which was almost exclusively the province of the Democrats, but some objected on other grounds to the pace and methods used to push civil rights, most famously Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds (Goldwater had supported other civil rights measures and would again). But those were disagreements about tactics, not outcomes.

Today, the American electorate and political system is all but unanimous in support of the measures taken during Stage One, Two and Four; the old Dixiecrat resistance is thoroughly discredited. Most conservatives today want no part of the objections raised by Goldwater and his allies at the time (although some of their systemic concerns about the slippery slopes created during that era have proven prophetic in other areas).

-Stage Five, beginning with the Great Society and the Nixon-era institution of affirmative action and the 1970s controversies over school busing and ongoing more than four decades later, remains much more enduringly controversial. Few, if any, of the racially charged issues of the past 47 years have had anything to do with legal equality for African-Americans, and after the last gasp of Wallace in 1968, political support for any vestige of Jim Crow vanished. On the GOP side, a number of the old Dixiecrats, led by Thurmond himself, switched parties. Ex-Dixiecrats like Thurmond and Jesse Helms abandoned their prior support for segregation along with the party they had left behind. On the Democratic side, they died out more slowly, with some still holding office into the 1980s, a number of whom (including Wallace) dramatically repented their prior ways. The old Dixiecrats who stayed in the Democratic Party spent the rest of their careers drawing overwhelming support from black voters; most depended on that support for their margins of victory. Meanwhile, Republicans who had supported civil rights throughout the 1960s generally found themselves shut out of that support.

The most dramatic political development of the post-1965 period has been the rise of the GOP and decline of the Democrats among white voters in the South. Which brings us to the mythology of how that happened and what it means to the two parties today.

The Myth

The basic "Southern Strategy" myth, popularized by Kevin Phillips in the early 1970s, goes like this: under LBJ's leadership, Democrats nobly and self-sacrificingly supported civil rights during Stage Four of the movement, giving an opening to opportunistic Republicans to crack the Democratic Solid South; following the support given by voters in some Deep South states to Goldwater in 1964, Nixon (formerly a supporter of civil rights) developed a "Southern Strategy" to use coded appeals to southern whites, enabling him to win the 1968 election; and everything the GOP has accomplished since 1968 is tainted by a continuous reliance on that same strategy to keep white southerners in the fold.

Like most myths, the Southern Strategy myth has some kernels of truth to it. It's true that LBJ changed his tune on civil rights in the Oval Office, and did so knowing that this would have costs to the party. This, as Trende notes, is the nature of political coalitions and why they are inherently unstable. It's true that Nixon, like Republicans as far back as TR, had the dream of adding white Southern support to his coalition, and dedicated a campaign strategy to doing so. And it's true that the South has, broadly speaking, been far more Republican since the late 60s than it was before.

But the reality is quite different from the myth.

The Real Story of the Un-Solid South

At the center of the Southern Strategy myth is the idea that Republicans used the race card to seduce Democratic voters in the South into leaving their natural partisan home. The truth, as Trende convincingly demonstrates, is the opposite: the growth of GOP support among white Southerners was steady and mostly gradual from 1928 to 2010, and was a natural outgrowth of the fact that white Southerners were ideologically much more compatible with the national Republican agenda and coalition than with the national Democratic agenda and coalition. What retarded the Southern switch from the Democrats to the GOP was a combination of party loyalties dating back to Reconstruction and the Democrats' use of racial issues. In other words, if you take race out of the picture, it's likely that white Southerners would have switched parties earlier and in greater numbers. The real "Southern Strategy" was the one pursued by the Democrats, especially under FDR, to keep conservative white Southerners in a liberal party.

Basically, Trende follows three lines of data. The first thing he does is look at voting patterns, not just bottom-line statewide Electoral College figures but the actual trends in the two-party popular presidential vote as well as downticket voting behavior by state, Congressional district and state gubernatorial and legislative elections. What he shows, on the one hand, is that the South was, from 1928 on, not as solidly Democratic as portrayed (and there were pockets of the South that had always been GOP-friendly, especially in Tennessee, Virginia and Texas). Some of that in the case of 1928 can be attributed to Southern Protestant resistance to voting for the Catholic Al Smith, but the fortunes of the GOP began to pick up significantly as conservative anti-union Southerners soured on the New Deal after 1936. And that accelerated under Eisenhower. Trende:

The Great Depression set Republicans back, but post-1948, Republicans began seriously working to pick the Democrats' lock on the South. In 1952, Eisenhower carried three Southern states. In 1956, he carried five, including deep Southern states like Louisiana.... Eisenhower came 15,000 votes in North Carolina from carrying a majority of the Southern states; he managed to carry a majority of the South's popular vote. And the days of Republicans receiving 5 percent of the vote in Deep Southern states were by then over. Eisenhower received at least one-third of the vote in every state in the Old Confederacy.

The same is true for Nixon in 1960, when the pro-Civil Rights Nixon, who...was representing an Administration that enforced Brown v. Board, carried Virginia, Tennessee and Florida. Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina were all decided by five points or less. Without LBJ as the Veep candidate, Nixon may well have carried those states - indeed Republicans picked up their first elected Southern Senate seat in history in a 1960 special election shortly after the election.

In 1964, Goldwater did break through in the Deep South. But compared to the preceding decade, that isn't all that surprising. Goldwater ran roughly even with Nixon in Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. He ran about ten points better in South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. On average, he ran two points ahead of Nixon. Compare this with 1952, when Eisenhower ran 22 points ahead of Dewey in the South.

The second trendline in the data is ideology. To accept the Southern Strategy myth that race is the dominant reason why white Southerners would find a home in the GOP, you have to ignore the role of (among other issues) economics, religion, and foreign policy/national security. Which is ridiculous; it is obviously not the case that the average white Southern voter would have been in perfect sync with George McGovern, Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis on those issues if not for the Magic Race Card. Trende supports this point in a variety of ways through legislative voting data on how elected Southern Democrats increasingly parted company from their party beginning in 1937-38 and running through their effective extinction in 2010. The process fed itself - the more white Southerners left the Democratic Party, the more liberal on all these issues the national party became, and the more it drove additional white Southerners to give the GOP a look.

The third trendline is demographic: Southern voters in successive generations tended to vote more Republican as their economic circumstances came to more closely resemble those of Republicans outside the South. As the South became less poor, less rural, and more suburban, it elected more Republicans.

Just as the South was less solidly Democratic than thought before 1968, it was less immediately solidly Republican after that. Southern candidates like Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 made significant inroads in their home region, and it took many years for Republican strength at the presidential level to seep downticket. Cost:

[W]hile the Deep South voted for Goldwater in 1964, the Democrats still carried a whopping 90 of 106 congressional districts in Dixie in 1964. In fact, the big breakthrough for the GOP in the House did not come until 1994. Prior to that, the Democrats could count on better than 3/5ths of the Southern congressional districts.

As late as 2010, there were still states like Alabama and North Carolina that were voting in their first Republican legislative majorities since Reconstruction - something that would have happened overnight in the late 60s if the partisan realignment had been driven by lockstep white voting loyalties on racial lines.

The actual 1960s-era Republican record on civil rights is also not what is painted by the myth. When Thurmond met with Nixon to pledge his support in 1968, he asked for reassurance from Nixon on one issue: missile defense. Williamson on Goldwater:

Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration's failure to help further the "just aspirations of the minority groups" and blasted the president for his refusal "to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens." Other planks in the platform included: "improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex." And Goldwater's fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding "full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen." Some dog whistle.

Alexander, on Nixon:

Nixon made more symbolic than substantive accommodations to white Southerners. He enforced the Civil Rights Act and extended the Voting Rights Act. On school desegregation, he had to be prodded by the courts in some ways but went further than them in others: He supervised a desegregation of Deep South schools that had eluded his predecessors and then denied tax-exempt status to many private "desegregation academies" to which white Southerners tried to flee. Nixon also institutionalized affirmative action and set-asides for minorities in federal contracting.

The Democrats and Race

Meanwhile, the Democratic record is hardly anything to be proud of. The first modern progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, was a horrible racist who did everything in his power to strengthen Jim Crow in the federal government and leave it alone in the states despite his usual preference for expanding federal power. Trende follows how FDR used more subtle racial appeals to hold white Southerners in his coalition while using economic issues to solidify the transition of black voters to loyal Democrats (Trende notes the generational element: older black voters who remembered Reconstruction stayed mostly loyal to the GOP, but died off). But in time, the natural instability of coalition politics took over: as black voters became the Democrats' most loyal base and were registered to vote in increasing numbers, Democratic politicians came to change their tune, with extreme examples like Wallace and LBJ. Williamson observes the turn from the LBJ of the 1950s:

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days, and that's a problem for us, since they've got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this - we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference."

to the LBJ of 1965:

President Johnson ... informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was "to have them n___ers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years."

Fundamentally, the Democratic Party's approach to racial and ethnic politics has not really changed all that much since the 1830s; it's just calibrated to a different audience.

Print The Legend

The Southern Strategy myth is too well-entrenched by now, and too essential to the Democrats' narrative and self-image, to expect that any level of contact with the facts can dispel it. But like a number of the myths about electoral politics dispelled in Trende's book, it's worth your time to learn those facts.